"Two weeks later on 20 January, Dotcom, Finn Batato, Mathias Ortmann and Bram van der Kolk were arrested in Coatesville, New Zealand by the New Zealand Police, in an armed raid on Dotcom's house involving 76 officers and two helicopters. Seized assets included eighteen luxury cars, large TVs, works of art and US$175 million in cash. Dotcom's bank accounts were frozen, denying him access to 64 bank accounts world-wide[...]"
No one legit has 175MM in cash sitting around. That's the realm of dictators and drug lords.
In general "That's really unusual behavior" shouldn't be enough to forfeit a fortune.
I feel the same about Musk's or Bezos' mind-boggling fortunes; Jeff isn't making $2M per hour while his exhausted employees make $16/hr (while peeing in bottles on a breakneck pace through the warehouse) because he's foregoing all human needs and limits, packing boxes at hypersonic speeds for 60 hours per day without rest. Obviously, he makes $2M/hr because their labor is worth $25/hr or more and he diverts the excess for himself.
Like it or not, but if he would do anything illegal other than "copyright violation" of US companies he'll surely be in prison in New Zealand a long time ago.
Soviet Union (1922-1991):
- Political repression, Gulag system, and forced labor
- Economic inefficiencies and consumer goods shortages
- Suppression of religious and cultural freedoms
- Estimated deaths: 10-20 million (including famines, purges, and Gulag deaths)
China under Mao (1949-1976):
- Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution chaos
- Suppression of intellectuals and traditional culture
- Collectivization and economic mismanagement
- Estimated deaths: 30-60 million (primarily from Great Chinese Famine)
Cambodia under Khmer Rouge (1975-1979):
- Forced labor and "return to year zero" policies
- Extreme social engineering and intellectual purges
- Near-total economic collapse
- Estimated deaths: 1.5-3 million (Cambodian Genocide)
North Korea (1948-present):
- Extreme political repression and personality cult
- Severe economic hardship and technological backwardness
- International isolation
- Estimated deaths: 240,000-3.5 million (1990s famine), 400,000+ in prison camps
Ethiopia under the Derg (1974-1991):
- Red Terror campaign of political repression
- Economic mismanagement leading to famine
- Civil war and ethnic conflicts
- Estimated deaths: 430,000-1.75 million (famine and Red Terror combined)
Cuba (1959-present):
- Political repression and limits on personal freedoms
- Economic hardships, especially post-Soviet support
- Mass exodus of citizens
- Estimated deaths: 3,000-4,000 (political executions)
Venezuela (under Chavez and Maduro, 1999-present):
- Economic collapse and hyperinflation
- Widespread shortages of food and medicine
- Erosion of democratic institutions
- Deaths: Difficult to quantify, but increased mortality due to shortages
East Germany (1949-1990):
- Stasi surveillance and political repression
- Restrictions on personal freedoms and travel
- Economic stagnation compared to West Germany
- Estimated deaths: 327 killed at Berlin Wall, thousands in prisons
Romania under Ceaușescu (1965-1989):
- Severe austerity measures and poverty
- Brutal suppression of dissent
- Disastrous social engineering policies
- Estimated deaths: 10,000-15,000 (political repression)
Vietnam (1975-present):
- Initial period of harsh re-education and collectivization
- Suppression of political dissent
- Economic hardships until later reforms
- Estimated deaths: 165,000 in re-education camps, tens of thousands in land reform
Basically it's now non-democratic country with wild capitalism.
... My assumption is that you believe, and above is all evidence pointing in this direction, that Marxism leads to malevolent dictatorships.
Whilst the example of the actions above aren't literal examples of what Marx espouses, they're the end result of societies that have attempted to pursue Marxist ideals. Emergent behaviour.
To be ridiculously reductionist, if Capitalism gets us Epstein and Communism gets us the stats you've provided, I know what I'd choose for my family (hint: being alive beats any alternative).
"A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon, all of which are highly authoritarian means. And the victorious party must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists." - communist manifesto
I don't think that all of them were malevolent either. Most of them probably thought that it would work, and that the end justifies whatever means, or that suffering is necessary for the reward in the end.
I'm going to noodle over that distinction of natural capitalism versus forced socialism.
I'm thinking along the lines of family-level (and maybe extended to friends and family / cooperative small village) socialism is natural, but on a societal level, of the scales we see today, capitalism is natural. Cooperation versus competition. Very interesting.
Capitalism doesn't mean competition over co-operation. It simply means that you don't have to co-operate if you don't get equal rewards, or if you don't get rewards proportional to your effort. People hate to co-operate if someone else gets the rewards. People love to co-operate if they get a fair share of the rewards, which is what happens under capitalism.
Owning stuff leads to trading and markets, which leads to the law of supply and demand and the price system. Just by looking at prices of things, people can make rational decisions about what to produce and what to consume. People are pushed to produce things that are scarce and expensive, and they are pushed to consume things that are abundant and cheap. This is a form of self-organized co-operation, where everyone co-operates automatically by just acting rationally. By looking out for themselves, they help allocate resources for the whole community. The lack of this mechanism is one of the major reasons why totalitarian socialism fails. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem
What does it have to do with capitalism? People like that or much worse thrive in non democratic states with no rule of law and absolutely no public transparency (e.g. Beria). It's just we don't really get to hear about them..
Bezos and Musk provided more value to society than one of their employees.
The convenience of Amazon wouldn't exist and it saved normal people a ridiculous amount of man-hours.
If you contributed something more valuable to the world you could also get more than $1M for your lifetime.
That's now how it works though. Someone with an iq of 101 isn't 1% more valuable than someone iq100. A man can easily be worth 10,000 times more with an iq of 150 than some average shlob.
> it's far more reasonable to assume that he assigned the value of the efforts of others to himself, stole, manipulated, scammed, or otherwise acquired that $175M illegitimately.
Easy, sure. Reasonable? No, it isn't. He wasn't phishing Grandma's facebook to get her to send him her life's savings. He had a service that other people wanted to use, they paid him for it. None of them complained that he wasn't providing the service. One user even sued the US government, claiming they seized his own personal documents when they seized the servers (had no backups of it). Quite a few were using it in ways most would consider legitimate.
> I feel the same about Musk's or Bezos' mind-boggling fortunes; Jeff isn't making $2M per hour while his exhausted employees make $16/hr (while peeing in bottles on a breakneck pace through the warehouse) because he's foregoing all human needs and limits,
Jeff Bezos was never making $2mil/hour at all. This is what happens when your economics education consisted of a dozen r/latestagecapitalism meme pictures.
Jeff Bezos famously had an $80,000 salary. I make more than that, and I'm a loser. The rest of you are probably making x2 or x3 as much, maybe more. He had assets of many millions of shares of stock, with an estimated worth of many billions depending on share price on any given day. It'd be like claiming you make $750,000/hr because your home's worth that much (according to Zillow, and only until you try to sell it and find out it's quite a bit less).
Remember: he's not being charged just for copyright infringement. If he was, then freezing his assets would be unusual. He's being charged with money laundering and racketeering, two crimes that involve illegal flows of money.
This video of Kim is a classic (I think it came out origianlly c. 2009). The last shot of his table with a stack of Gold Bars in the middle is very revealing (or maybe moreso is his Rolls Royce with the plate "GOD")....
"At only 1.5 years of age, (kims kid) is already at the top of most xbox leaderboards." What??
His bodyguards are picked out by a Kung Fu master?? This is so ridiculously cliche. Nobody serious about their security would hire Kung Fu martial artists to train their team. I train a bunch of martial arts (boxing, muay thai, bjj, hapkido) and I would never use something like kung fu in a tussle. I've got 16yo junior amateur boxers that could probably knock that kung fu master out in a single hit.
Gold bricks are here https://youtu.be/A4TXAaqmj0E?t=365
I wonder what the threshold is for assets worth seizing. Anything under about 100” is going to cost more to seize than it’s worth. If the kitchen is full of AllClad do they seize the cookware?
Feds seem to be a bit more discriminating, tending towards larger amounts of cash, bullion, vehicles, and real estate. But I've seen more than a few news articles over the years where they seized property you might call petty.
I get that there’s a lot of corruption, but “nice GameBoy, my kid’ll love it after auction” seems like a stretch even for the US. If nothing else, it has a paper trail, right?
> I get that there’s a lot of corruption, but “nice GameBoy, my kid’ll love it after auction” seems like a stretch even for the US.
Choose to believe or not, matters not to me. But I would point you at the many mainstream news articles of places that make road trips through where the local police shake people down for valuables, and the many corvettes and sports cars painted in black and white that cops drive as squad cars. Are these confiscating those because they make such good vehicles for hauling people away to the holding cell?
The people using the word to say that Kimmy D isn't smallfolk don't even understand the vocabulary they favor.
How would you do it?
You don’t have to feel sorry for the film studios of course, I’m not crying for them either. But I still think there’s a difference between pirating movies and having an advantageous position in a job market.
I do. What's indicated here is an overabundance of pricing power on the film studios' side, which is a direct result of laws and policies that were designed to benefit and advantage businesses over labor (for a variety of reasons, some justifiable and some not). You want to cast this as a natural and organic process when it's anything but; if it were, the skill ceiling involved in the trade and returns from movie sales would likely have topped out at a more appropriate point vis a vis wages. That is, the fact that these CG-heavy films are making more money than ever, and that VFX is incredibly difficult to break into because of the high skill required, and wages are still low, and VFX studios are still going under, suggests that wages are being artificially depressed.
>But I still think there’s a difference between pirating movies and having an advantageous position in a job market.
Nah. It's a case of filthy-rich scammers getting scammed by a filthy rich scammer. Their bad behavior, at the very least, helps to legitimize exploitation (popularly, if not so much legally). But I think it goes further than that. The depressed wages of labor and concentration of capital in the hands of elite executives and business owners has helped to shape the socioeconomic status quo, where so many consumers simply can't afford to purchase film tickets and media the way that they used to be able to, but also where the pressure to participate in pop culture and consume content is stronger than ever. The result is that people are willing to access this content however they can, creating an opportunity for hustlers like Kim.
Obviously, the solution is to dismantle many of the policy benefits that let big businesses exploit workers, and to break up the capital accretion that allowed them to capture policy in the first place. Dismantle the economic distortions that led us here.
But if Hollywood execs are scamming the people whose labor makes their whole venture possible in the first place, that's worth expending energy on. Hence, again, the strikes.
Definitely not "small folk like us".
If he was a drug lord or if he was even remotely connected to malicious security services he would have been long taken by force. New Zealand is a close US ally.
How do you explain this part then:
> Dotcom's bank accounts were frozen, denying him access to 64 bank accounts world-wide
Can you explain why we should be fixated with how much money he has or how he stores his money wrt the criminal case being prosecuted? If there was something there wouldnt they have revealed it in their accusations years ago?
I was just pointing out the irony in your comment where you just assert that it was perfect in line with is character to have ALL is money in cash while literally the next line says he has 64 bank accounts scattered all over the globe.
Feels like we are being a bit pedantic.
Not that that justifies anything, people should be free to keep as much physical cash as they want.
Don't see what's wrong to preserve your property outside of the modern banking system if you are against the US.
But no matter how big/small he is, I don't approve of other countries extraditing their citizens to the US for things they did while physically outside the US. Especially when the US wouldn't do the same when it comes to its citizens.
He created a site where you can upload anything with complete privacy and anonymity. And then used it for racketeering, allegedly, which is where the government interest starts. The RIAA/MPAA want their pound of flesh, too, and it gave plenty of fertile ground for the US DOJ to build a case around so that they could get discovery and find out what they were really trying to get access to. But the piracy is not the point; not by a long shot.
As with anything that allows absolute anonymity AND absolute privacy, it's bound to attract bad actors. Yes, the "pirate music" types. But ALSO the "sell humans" and "provide criminal services (hitman/fraud agent/patsy agreement/etc)" types.
Dotcom can turn blind eyes all he wants, but if won't take responsibility for the damage he is facilitating, it is in the public interest for him to be held accountable against his will.
I'll never stop pirating media, and I'd never want a media pirate to go to jail. But I'll never defend a human trafficker either, no matter how "innocent" they allow themselves to remain via intentional ignorance.
Great, sounds like a dream to avoid dirty hands of USA/China/UK/... regimes
MPAA/RIAA needing to be saved from racketeering is epic levels of irony
Wait, where did that come from? Did Kim Dotcom facilitate human trafficking?
Using the strictest logic, you should not take my word for it. Maintain a healthy skepticism that human trafficking was ever facilitated via Dotcom's enterprises. I have not provided any direct evidence that anything like that was going on and, as stated, I'm not in a position to. Everyone is more than welcome to believe that nothing more untoward than media piracy was going on in a world-renown, legally-battle-tested, completely anonymous, completely private marketplace of data.
I don't necessarily agree you should be taken away from your home-country because of that, seems relatively minor in the grand scale of things, but he was hardly "just sharing songs on the internet".
Let's just call it how it is: USA dictatorship. Just imagine the comments if China/Russia did this stuff
In this case, he annoyed powerful IP owners, and those people in our current society are as powerful as they get.
That's 2 orders of magnitude up the resources invested.
And not even for stealing in the case of Mega, but for assumed money people would have paid to IP owners if the service hadn't existed. Which is a premise pirates have been debunking for years.
When I used mega, I didn't have the money for the content. Today I pay for netflix and steam games.
This is not about justice, this is about power.
"Long time" is subjective.
> I don't necessarily agree you should be taken away from your home-country because of that
New Zealand doesn't agree either, it's not on the short list of crime categories that one can be extradited for. I seem to remember a headline from a decade ago where the US charges were amended to try to sidestep that. When the exact crimes one is accused of are subject to modification to squirm around protections, maybe the people prosecuting are worse than those being prosecuted.
Whether you think the particular laws are ethical or not, if you publicly break them, they will catch up with you.
Actually to that end he got millions in cash facilitating piracy of movies/tv/software
Yes, the belief is that the source of his wealth was from MegaUpload and Mega.
But, I misspoke--the point I intended to make is that MU was making far more from download users than upload users. I made it sound like subs weren't a part of that, but they were. It's a question of what they were actually paying for.
Technically the subscriptions were paying for storage, but the indictment also cites MUs on database as showing only 5 million out of 60+ million registered users ever uploaded anything.
I mean, is it really a file sharing service if the vast majority of your paying customers don't share any files?